Dr. Peter Van Kleeck, Sr., Musings in Bibliology

Every Christian saint anticipates an eternal home in heaven. The Scripture describes heaven as a real, tactile place, where the saints with glorified bodies like the resurrected Christ will live forever. Every born-again believer lives with this eschatological orientation and ambition until the time of their death. Christians, or regenerated new creatures, are, by virtue of their new nature, inherently future-oriented.

Something must happen to the person for this eschatological trajectory to become normative. The source of this future yearning orientation is the Word and the Spirit who teaches the word to the believer and regenerates the soul. Prior to salvation, the natural man’s time orientation begins with birth and ends with their death, a century long at best. Regeneration by the Spirit and through the word produces this change in a person’s eschatological vision for themselves moving from a short perspective of life to the reality of everlasting life. The Scripture tells us about the future and the Spirit confirms its truth and authority as God’s word to us. This interaction is normative for the believer but the implications of the dynamic between saint, word, and the Holy Spirit in reference to the future is profound.

This book argues that the personal certainty the believer possesses regarding the future is grounded on a certain and settled future because the divine, eternal scheme for all time has been “forever settled in heaven,” Psalm 119:89. The future has been predetermined and recorded and secured in heaven, and by inspiration has been revealed to mankind in the 66-book canon of Holy Scripture. Certainty of the eternal state, or Eschaton, of which heaven is a component, is the issue before us. The Church only knows of its existence because God has informed us of it in his Word.

Pre-tribulation, mid-tribulation, post-tribulation, pre-millennial, amillennial, and any interpretation in between, all of these scenarios will be meaningless in the Eschaton. The Bible version debate will be meaningless in the Eschaton. Every theological query will be meaningless in the Eschaton. The curse will be removed, and all things will be made new. Sinners will be judged and the righteous in Christ will be rewarded. How the Scripture is to be understood will be answered and the saints will be forever glorified with the Lord.

The perfect pure inspired autograph will no longer be in question in the Eschaton. And because inspiration is a once and for all process for the autograph to exist in the Eschaton, God’s perfect, pure inspired word must be providentially preserved throughout history to exist in the holy and glorious eternal state. While the accident of writing has proven to have its flaws and shortcomings, the substantia doctrinea is perfectly preserved and will be to the very end of time.

The premise of this volume is as follows: inspired scripture’s divine authority as God’s word is necessarily canonical because of demands placed on Scripture by the Eschaton. Scripture’s authority is not only grounded in its inception as divinely inspired but in the Eschaton’s mandate that its very existence is dependent upon that inspired text. No terminus would exist if not for an inspired Scripture to make it so, and the certain and perfect nature of the Eschaton requires a text capable of producing something certain and perfect. Not certain or perfect according to relative standards but certainty and perfection demanded by the Eternal State. Working backward from the end of time, the Eschaton’s nature and existence demands an inspired and preserved text of Scripture. The future cannot be the perfect, sinless, Christ-centered, glorious future of God’s design apart from preserved divinely inspired Scripture.

Previous written works have argued for the providential preservation of scripture chronologically from Scripture’s inception by inspiration up to the present and into the Eschaton. This volume will argue that the Eschaton makes demands on inspired Scripture that mandate Scripture’s immutability and purity; that inspired Scripture, stands alone, and unlike any other document, that substantia doctrina is not subject to the entropy that characterizes the totality of this sin cursed world. In other words, this book argues for a standard sacred text not from the beginning to the end but from the end back to the beginning.

This argument is therefore a theological apologetic, or Christian commitments through which all empirical evidence is evaluated. All major doctrines of the Bible can be considered eschatologically – Soteriology, Christology, Pneumatology, Eschatology, Hamartiology, Ecclesiology, Theology, Angelology, Anthropology – each possessing an eschatological component. Bibliology likewise has an eschatological component and can be considered looking back from the future to the present and this aspect of Bibliology is the theme of this book. Scripture can be spoken of as being predestined in Psalm 119:89 and unchanging and eternal in Rev. 22:19, or unchanging and eternal in Rev. 22:10 to predestined because Scripture like every other doctrine has a certain endpoint in the exaltation of the Son. All theological formulations can be considered either from the future to the past of from the past to the future – from election to glorification or from glorification to election because the eternal plan of God is absolute and certain, it cannot be any other way, with an unchanging end point in the exaltation of the Son.

The volume begins with the end of revealed time, working back to determine what characteristics of holy Scripture make it suitable to exist in the Eschaton. What demands does the terminus make upon history to produce the certain, predetermined end point ordained by God for His inspired Word? The end of revealed time, or the Eschaton, or eternal state, transcends terrestrial history bringing the consummation of the Father’s redemptive plan in the exaltation and reign of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. As such the eternal state is characterized by words such as purity, holiness, glory, and truth and the absence of any remnant of the curse. The question at hand, then, is want demands does the eschaton, or end point of God’s eternal plan, perpetually place on the flow of history to guarantee with absolute certainty that the nature of the autograph is preserved to be suitable to be part of the perfect glorification and magnification of His Son in Rev. 22:21.

This statement necessarily begs the question, what about the unquantifiable providential preservation of Scripture throughout history? Was not Scripture obviously subject to multiple historic pressures and influences throughout time? From the Eschaton, historic development, pressures, and influences are no longer relevant. The Scriptures as eternally intended perfectly and purely occupy the End Point of redemptive history. The inspired word of the Eschaton will be identical to the word “forever settled in heaven.” Arguing after the fact that something didn’t occur after the word and event confirm the event is feckless. Every argument for the impact of entropy upon God’s written word, from the Eschaton will be irrational in that there is nothing historical to prevent the purity of the Scripture in the Eschaton from being such.

To argue that his approach is a “being” vs. “knowing” apologetic would be to misunderstand the issue. Indeed, Scripture is ontologically God’s Word whether it is epistemologically understood in history to be such. But the so-called science of textual criticism has isolated every argument for the preservation of Scripture to a monodirectional, historical perspective as conspicuously correct because it has disregarded the eschatological significance of the inspired text. Believing bible scholars have limited their scholarly polemic and apologetic to a monodirectional context for scripture beginning at inspiration and ending with providential preservation. Substantially, the reason for this is that believing scholars have isolated their presentations to empirical arguments essentially to that of their interlocutors. Only if the apologetic is theologically based can this single trajectory be shown to be deficient, opening the door for an argument for the preservation and purity of Scripture from the future. In other words, once the Corvette is at the end of the assembly line, and the finishing touches are made, and it is doing 186 mph on the track, the details of how it was manufactured are visibly answered in the finished product. In a provincial way, this is an argument made for the superiority of the King James Bible. Questions of origin, etc., are debated incessantly, but the fact it has been the standard sacred text of the believing Church for over 400 years speaks for itself. This argument, you will note, is wholly discredited by the post critical camp because the argument is one from the future to the past, from the present back to the 16^th century. The present future validates the past. And so, the Eschaton validates all the past for holy Scripture. Whatever the perceived problems with the linear unfolding of history, they will all prove inconsequential to the perfect preservation of God’s Word to the end of time.

The Failure of the Historical/Critical Method

One of the many significant failures of the historical critical method is reversing the eschatological trajectory of holy Scripture. This single factor created a novel approach to God’s inspired word that had always been oriented toward the future. On a canonical level, or dealing with Scripture in a collective sense, from Scripture’s inception the cumulation of inspired writings to the formation of the OT and NT canons and then a 66 – book canon demonstrated Scripture’s eschatological emphasis. And with the formation of the canon the translation of Scripture into other languages opens new truths for every language group it impacted. On an exegetical level, or taken from a distributive sense, the teaching of Scripture is wholly oriented to the culmination of redemptive history in the Eschaton.

But with the historical critical method the inherent eschatological trajectory of holy Scripture was not only halted but reversed, an academic retardation of the very forward-looking nature of inspired Scripture. Rather than looking forward to what Scripture is and does in the world, the critic has the Church looking backward as if Scripture’s future is uncertain or at worse, never was. And while new versions are advertised as being novel and progressive, they are billed as being more reliable by looking backwards to the fallacy of “older and better manuscripts” always existing under the existential threat of some yet undiscovered writing.

For modern textual critics discussions of the future and therefore discussion of the eschaton is irrelevant. Modern texts inherently describe only the epoch of their research, evidence, and writing because the interpretation of their evidentialist grounding is grossly incapable of asserting from the future the truth content of past assessments. Such time constrained documents describe the sectarian epoch of the editors, disabling the paradigmatic Eschaton from asserting itself over the author’s work, because the absolute, immutable character of the eschaton demands an inspired text to certainly reveal a certain terminus, all attributes foreign to the modern textual critical method.

Modern textual critically oriented bibles are not created to fulfill the same purpose as God’s written word. Modern versions are designed to exist only until the next revision and no further, but none are designed to answer the demands of God’s predestined terminus. Such revisions, though images of Scripture, cannot meet the demands of God’s terminus for a myriad of reasons. Such revisions are fluid, evolving, and uncertain, all characteristics foreign to descriptions of the eschaton. A volume limited by historic, empirical restraints is intrinsically incapable of meeting the demands of God’s terminus. Such documents are of another type that fall under a separate phenomenal paradigm. Some kind of immediate, historic efficacy may be possible, but they are incapable of meeting the comprehensive demands of the future eternal state.

By replacing inspiration with history as the governing factor of Scripture, modern textual critics replaced the testimony of God in His word with arbitrary, evolving critical “science” and are perpetually looking in the diametrically wrong direction of inspired scriptures trajectory. The liberal critic rejects the deity of Christ and the inspiration of Scripture while the evangelical textual critic separates the deity of Christ from inspired Scripture. They believe what the words of Scripture say about Christ, but they do not believe the message is inspired. Indeed, the modern textual critic obsolescence with the rise of artificial intelligence should put the scholars out of work. (See “The Lamp”). The critic does not know where he is going while convincing us he knows the way. His answer to not knowing his destination is simply to say no one knows the destination; that we are all lost on some desert road with no landmarks in sight. But the Church knows the horrendous error of this assessment. The Church, by the grace of God, knows where it is going and how to get there the Church also knows that the only way to get to the Eschaton is by the work of the Word and Spirit by the grace of God. This book argues that arriving at an absolute telos requires an absolute method, something only possible by the providential preservation of God Himself throughout history.